by Alix Ohlin
So instead she says, “It does sound weird.”
On the screen her father’s face pixelates, freezes, then releases. “We should have kept in better touch with them,” he’s saying. “It was just so hard at the time. And John’s father was sort of difficult.”
“There’s nothing about the dad on John’s Facebook. It’s like he doesn’t exist.”
“This is a sad story,” her father says, and they move on to happier things.
* * *
—
After they hang up, she checks her cousin’s Facebook page to find that it has exploded with concern. His friends are posting like crazy, some supporting his “brave alternative life choices,” others worrying about his state of mind. A woman named Meg writes, “Don’t you people understand that this Landau place is a cult?”
A chain of comments unspools beneath this post:
It’s not a cult, it’s a utopian community.
He’s not allowed any communication with the outside world—tell me what’s utopian about that.
If John wants to try something different, why shouldn’t he? Life in this capitalist gun-infested hellscape of a country isn’t for everyone.
Please don’t make this political.
Where’s his family in this, anyway?
We need to save him. Intervene.
John, can you tell us more about this Landau place?
I don’t know why you guys are even posting here since John isn’t checking his page anymore.
Amanda clicks over to something else, and she’s watching TV when she gets a message from Meg, who is apparently John’s ex-girlfriend and knows that Amanda is his cousin. She says that John isn’t in touch with his father, who now lives in Orlando, remarried, with two young children. John’s been having a hard time lately, she reports, has been out of work for a while. She repeats the claim about the cult, then says she’d go check on him herself, but just had a baby. (Not John’s, she writes, then adds, Long story, as if Amanda had pressed her for details.)
Can you go? You’re close by.
Amanda writes, I haven’t seen John in almost fifteen years.
Meg writes, But aren’t you family?
Amanda contemplates the absurdity of this. Then she thinks of the Labor Day trip she’s supposed to take, with her family at Rehoboth, everyone hugging her, the smiles and laughter and music, talk of Emily’s wedding, new babies, and dogs, how perfect Labor Day is there, with the late-summer light dazzling on the water, and she writes, Yes.
Somehow Meg has located an address for “the Landau,” but no phone number. Maybe there is no phone. Cults in general seem anti-phone. If it is a cult which, Meg’s concern notwithstanding, she isn’t convinced it is.
As she gasses up the car, stocking Red Vines and Diet Coke for the journey, her mood is buoyant. The weather is road-trip perfect, sunny and clear, made for blasting tunes and singing along with the pure abandon of the solo driver. One summer in college, she drove from Boston to Florida to visit a boyfriend who had an internship in marine biology. When she got there, he wasn’t all that happy to see her, and they had an awkward dinner at a crab shack—all that sucking, all those napkins—before he told her he was seeing somebody else and asked her to drive home. The humiliation was major and yet, oddly enough, ephemeral. What stuck in her mind from the experience was the image of herself she’d held in her mind all the way down: she’d stand on a dock in a white dress, hair fluttering in the wind, the picture of lovely, vulnerable romance. When she thinks of it now, she remembers the billowing optimism of the trip and not the deflation of arrival.
She still likes road trips. She likes how being in the car makes you live in the moment, suspended between two points. She also likes grilled cheese sandwiches eaten in diners, gas station snacks, tacky billboards, and cheap sunglasses. For an hour or two, outside Scranton, she even forgets where she’s going.
* * *
—
Nerves don’t hit until she exits the highway and lumbers through a slow succession of pallid, downtrodden streets. This isn’t the upstate New York of antique stores and farmers’ markets. These are places abandoned by industry, previously whole mansions carved into Section 8 housing, Main Streets half-filled by obstinate stores. The address she’s been given is on a rural route and she almost misses the turn at a Stewart’s. Whatever spontaneous impulse guided her to accept Meg’s challenge—because that’s what it was, a challenge—has ebbed, and she wonders what on earth she’s going to say to this cousin she hasn’t seen since they were kids.
But she isn’t going to turn back, either; she’s always been stubborn. When she was little, her mother used to tell her: “Don’t be like the stubborn oak, bow and bend like a willow tree.” It was from a Shaker song. She remembers that.
So deep is she inside her thoughts that she’s surprised to discover she has arrived, all of sudden, at a lovely old farmhouse that looks recently restored. Freshly painted white, with green shutters, a vegetable garden off to one side, a set of Adirondack chairs on the expansive porch: it ought to be a bed-and-breakfast. It ought to be an ad for something. It is what her own house ought to look like, but doesn’t. The only strange thing about it is a kind of stillness: no movement, no sound. She slams the car door, hard, and stands for a moment, looking around.
Knocking on the door, she feels sticky in the humid, windless afternoon and finds herself, inexplicably, shivering. The place is too quiet. She can’t hear anything from inside, and the windows are all closed, curtains drawn. She knocks again, waits, knocks again. Maybe the cult isn’t home. Maybe they’re out running cult errands. Finally some soft footsteps thud toward her, and a young man opens the door, around twenty years old and so good-looking that for a second she doesn’t know what to say. He’s wearing a crisp white button-down shirt and khakis, like a Gap ad. His blond hair is slicked on the sides with gel.
“Mr. Wilson doesn’t speak to visitors,” he says with a poised, regretful smile.
“Oh, I’m not here for Mr. Wilson. I wanted to see John? I’m his cousin.”
A gentle silence greets this statement. She tries to press, to seem unthreatening and naïve. “I was in the neighborhood, well not exactly the neighborhood but not far from here, visiting a friend, and I heard he’d moved up here, and I really wanted to see him, you know, it’s been years?” The eyes that meet hers are blue and blank, a computer program lacking algorithms for these particular inputs. So she steps closer, tilts her head to the side, going for girlish. “I just wanted to say hello.”
He shuts the door, but politely, managing to communicate a pause in the action rather than a refusal. On the porch, she turns around and surveys the property. There is an apple tree on the other side of a clearing. Still no sound, not even birds. Her car is the only one here.
Behind her, the door opens again and when she looks around the blond guy is smiling. “You can follow me.” They thread their way along a dim hallway until they reach a sitting room. Or is it a parlor? Living room is too banal a term for this place, which is furnished out of a different era, with different vocabulary. A chesterfield. A phonograph. Two brocaded armchairs with arched legs. A bookshelf with leather hardcover editions, titles stamped in gold. All this she takes in as her blond guide breathes, “Take a seat,” and evaporates.
But she’s still standing when John comes in and she’s glad she is, because he wraps her in a bear hug and lifts her several feet off the ground. There’s too much of him to take in at once, his big eyes, his smile, the fact that he’s also wearing a white-collared shirt and khakis, apparently the house uniform, as if they’re about to go to church or casual Friday at an uptight office.
“I knew it was you. I just had a feeling,” her cousin says, and they smile at each other, Amanda so glad to see him that she’s suddenly almost in tears. As a teenager John was sullen and acne ridden, but as children the
y’d often spent weeks at the beach together, collecting shells and jumping in the water, and some vestige of that time seems to hang in the air between them.
“I wanted to see you,” she tells him, and it’s the truth.
They sit down on the chesterfield, and the blond guy brings them drinks in tall frosted glasses. The air is cool as a cave. “So,” she says, “what is this place?”
Her cousin smiles, looking not at all self-conscious or suspicious about why she’s here. She remembers that he probably never even saw all that debate on his Facebook page. Instead of answering the question, he offers to take her on a tour. If he thinks it’s odd she’s come to see him unannounced, if he anticipates some kind of intervention or conflict, he doesn’t show it. His happiness to see her seems pure, and she feels retroactive guilt for how irritated she was by all his Facebook activity. “Here, this is cool.” He pauses in the hallway to show her an oil painting of the house’s original owner, some angry-looking colonial guy with chins bulging down his neck. A minor Revolutionary War battle apparently took place in the backyard; Hessian mercenaries once camped out in the parlor. Upstairs is his room, with a plain white coverlet tucked neatly over a twin bed and a small desk with a notebook and pen on it. There is nothing on the walls. From the window, he can see an apple tree outside.
Standing in his monastic room, Amanda is struck by something she hasn’t felt in years: a keen, swelling balloon of envy. She would give anything to live here, in this simple, quiet place. Beside her John nods, as if he has eavesdropped on her longing. “It’s the best place I’ve ever been,” he says.
He shows her to another bedroom, which looks very much the same as his, and offers it to her for the night. Instantly she accepts. They’ll continue the tour later, he says, after dinner, and she nods. “For now, why don’t you rest?” She nods again, already drowsy. She kicks off her shoes and sits on the bed; it’s possible she’s asleep before he closes the door.
* * *
—
What wakes her is a chime. For a long moment, she has no idea where she is, and the experience is strangely pleasant. The indeterminate light could mean dawn or dusk. Then she hears the chime again, and remembers. In a bathroom down the hall, she washes her face and makes a lame attempt at fixing her hair. She pulls a wrinkled sundress from her bag and adds a cotton cardigan, feeling a desire to impress. Her phone buzzes; it’s a text from Meg, wanted to know what’s going on; she drops the phone back in her bag and heads downstairs.
In the parlor she finds five clean-cut, well-dressed men of varying ages holding cocktails who smile at her genially. John, who has been leaning over the record player, lets the needle drop on some classical music and then joins her, introducing her to the crowd.
“Everyone, this is Amanda.” He rattles off names in quick succession; there’s a Luke and a Michael and she loses the rest. As he presses a drink into her hand, everyone comes over to say hello and ask, solicitously, how her trip has been. She feels gently fussed over, as if by grandparents.
“And this,” John says, “is Jason Wilson.”
One of the great thinkers of our time is a slight man in a blue shirt, with dark brown hair and happy-looking brown eyes. “We’re delighted you’re here. You found us okay?” he asks, as if he’d sent directions. She says yes. Wilson is also wearing khakis, and bucks, less guru than Brooks Brothers. The Brooks Brothers guru. She laughs a little, to herself, and Wilson laughs, too, as if he understands.
“Come to dinner,” he says, touching her elbow softly as he guides her. He is a gentleman.
* * *
—
At dinner, the talk is of Brahms and Emerson and John Singer Sargent, who once painted a portrait of Wilson’s great-great-grandfather, or maybe it was his great-grandfather, or maybe somebody his great-great-grandfather knew. She’s had a few cocktails and can’t keep up. But the five men—including, to her astonishment, her cousin—all hold opinions on these topics, on how Brahms constructs harmony in his piano concertos, how Sargent illuminates the details of clothing. Is this a cult, or is it college? Wilson introduces each topic, drawing connections between one thing and the next, referencing Joshua Reynolds’s theory of the aesthetic or linking Beethoven to the sublime. She spends some time trying to remember what John majored in—she wants to say computer science? Across the table, the guru catches her eyes.
“Perhaps this all seems quite strange to you,” he says, “but this is the home we’ve made. A place where those of us who care deeply about classical knowledge can come together to discuss it. The outside world”—he doesn’t even gesture toward it, merely lifts his eyes in the direction of the window—“cares little. But here we are passionate.”
They smile at each other. “I, uh, kind of wish I knew more about all this stuff,” Amanda says.
“Then you should stay.” His warmth is unmistakable. “We could use a woman’s touch.”
The blond guy who answered the door clears the plates; he seems the youngest, and Amanda wonders if he’s an intern, or a servant. But John gets up and pours more wine, and someone else carries in dessert. Amanda drinks it all, eats it all. Her cousin presses his lips against her ear, fleshy and wet with spittle. “I’m glad you’re here,” he whispers.
And maybe that’s why later, in the twin bed, in the airless bedroom, she dreams of him. They are teenagers on the beach in Virginia. This could be a memory. Certainly she’s aware, even in the dream, of the physical reality of her cousin: his frightening, newly adolescent body, skinny and tall and sprouting wispy hair at nipples and armpits. As if to deny these corporeal facts, they run into the waves together, like they used to when they were kids, but it’s not the same. After splashing each other for a minute or two with listless self-consciousness they turn back to where their mothers are watching, high up on the beach under umbrellas, drinking their cool drinks. They decide to dive. The ocean is empty of seaweed; the sand is smooth and fine. Underwater she feels her cousin reaching for her, clawing at her arms as if he’s drowning, and she can’t understand what he’s doing, raking his large hands across her chest, pushing her down or away. She chokes and kicks, the water a churn of salt and white, and then she wakes up sweating in a mess of sheets and no one is watching her and she is all grown, and motherless.
* * *
—
In the morning, clad in shorts and plain white T-shirts, the men fan out around the property, doing chores. From her bedroom, she hears hammering, the buzz of a mower. When she takes a shower down the hall, she runs quickly back to the bedroom in her towel, but encounters no one. Downstairs, Jason Wilson sits alone in the dining room, drinking coffee and reading The New York Times. She joins him hesitantly, serving herself coffee from a white urn on the table; without speaking, he finishes the first section of the paper, folds it, and passes it to her. The coffee is strong. When she looks up, he’s staring at her, a gaze whose force is palpable, discomfiting, and yet very clearly not sexual in nature. She doesn’t know what the look is or what it means.
Thank God her cousin arrives, smelling of sweat and grass, pouring himself orange juice from a jug on a side table. Though she hasn’t heard a bell or a command, it seems clear to her that he has been summoned, and sure enough Wilson says, “I thought you two could go the store today.”
“Sure,” she says, and watches as he hands her cousin a list. Then he exits the room. He’s the only one who isn’t wearing shorts. John disappears and returns in ten minutes, wearing another clean white shirt. In her camp shirt with its bright pink retro ’70s slogan (summer fun!) Amanda feels kitschy and commercialized. Unpure, maybe. Working from home, she has little need for formal clothes and still dresses basically the way she did in college, which has always seemed like an advantage, until now.
At the grocery store, they divide up the list, each taking different sections, though her cousin often frowns at her choices and sends her back fo
r others; they want European butter, organic eggs. The brand requirements are specific. There is also a long list of alcohol. In the end the cart is piled so high they have to get another one. At the checkout, her cousin says, “Since you’re staying with us, would you mind?” So Amanda pulls out her card and charges five hundred dollars and it doesn’t feel any more surreal than anything else that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours.
On the way back, at her suggestion, they stop at the Stewart’s and pick up ice cream sandwiches, which she pays for also, and sit on the hood of the car, eating and looking at the parking lot. Even at the gas station the air smells good, fir scented and clean.
“So you know your friends are pretty worried about you.”
Her cousin looks surprised. “My friends? Who?”
“There was a whole Facebook thing, discussion, whatever.” She gestures vaguely at the parking lot, as if social media were lurking beyond the cars. “People wondering what you’re doing up here, exactly.”
“Ah,” John says, noncommittal.
She decides to press. “Meg Patterson is particularly concerned.”
He barks a short gulping laugh. “Meg and I went out for maybe six months, a couple years ago. She used to pack me a lunch when I went to work. She used to fold my underwear. She’s sweet, but she’s too much, you know? There’s caring about someone, and then there’s…whatever it is that she does.”
Amanda tries to imagine what it would be like to have a boyfriend make her lunch, or do her laundry. The last guy she dated, Shamir, was a computer programmer who put his jeans in the freezer instead of washing them, claiming the cold killed the bacteria just as well. He was smart and funny and perfectly happy to eat delivery pizza every single night. They didn’t break up because she was annoyed by his habits; they broke up because each of them preferred to stay at home, in front of a laptop, and driving all the way over to the other person’s house took too much effort. They still Gchatted sometimes.
